The Right Banks to Own

Much of Warren Buffett's success can be explained by his advice for investors to "be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful."

Since we all know there's fear surrounding the financial industry, now seems like an opportune moment to buy the very best banks (emphasis on "very best") at a significant discount.

Therefore, I used the screener found in CAPS, to uncover banks that had market capitalizations of more than $2 billion, a four- or five-star rating on CAPS, and more than 200 active CAPS picks.

To elaborate on that second point, since we began tracking the performance of our CAPS community, four- and five-star stocks have outpaced the broader market by seven and 12 percentage points annualized, respectively.

Here are the banks our community loves and believes will emerge from this global financial crisis to make investors a lot of money:

Data from CAPS screen of Aug. 19, 2008, and from Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's.

Not only are they ranked highly in our community of investors, but they're all also international banks, so they're well isolated from the credit trouble and housing mess that U.S. banks are facing today. This isn't to say that they'll avoid the mess altogether, but their risks and leverage problems are likely less than what U.S. banks face.

I encourage you to come and join us on Motley Fool CAPS to do some further due diligence on all of these companies, and let the collective wisdom of more than 115,000 other investors help you in your quest for the right banks to buy in this time of uncertainty.